Saturday, March 04, 2017

Today in framing

Former President Obama on Saturday denied President Trump’s accusation that Obama had Trump Tower phones tapped in the weeks before the November 2016 election.

Where's the "slam"? (For that matter, where's the Kenyan?)

“Neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false," said Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for the former president.

"Slam" is a go-to headline verb at Fox, so I guess that's a toss-up. But as a mere technical matter, if any slamming was done, it wasn't done by the ex-usurper himself. There is, of course, much more fun to be had:

... Trump does not specify how he uncovered the Obama administration's alleged wiretapping.

President Trump on Saturday angrily accused former president Barack Obama of orchestrating a “Nixon/Watergate” plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower headquarters last fall in the run-up to the election.While citing no evidence to support his explosive allegation, Trump said in a series of four tweets sent Saturday morning that Obama was “wire tapping” his New York offices before the election in a move he compared to McCarthyism. “Bad (or sick) guy!” he said of his predecessor, adding that the surveillance resulted in “nothing found.”Trump offered no citations nor did he point to any credible news report to back up his accusation, but he may have been referring to commentary on Breitbart and conservative talk radio suggesting that Obama and his administration used “police state” tactics last fall to monitor the Trump team. The Breitbart story, published Friday, has been circulating among Trump's senior staff, according to a White House official who described it as a useful catalogue of the Obama administration's activities.

Pesky "sources"!

Trump had departed Washington in a fury on Friday, fuming at a senior staff meeting in the Oval Office that morning about Sessions' decision to recuse himself. Trump was angry and told his top aides that he disagreed with the attorney general's decision and that he thought the White House and Justice Department should have done more to counter the suggestion that Sessions needed to step away. The president told staff he wanted to see them fight back against what he saw as a widespread effort to destabilize his presidency, according to senior White House officials who were not authorized to speak publicly.

Oh, and the "awkward moment?" story?

Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 White House bid was set back by an email controversy, was seen in a photograph taken Friday intently looking at a newspaper story about Vice President Pence’s email issues.

Harder with photos, isn't it? Photos have a characteristic called "indexicality" (Messaris & Abraham, 2001): they're evidently true about something, even if they're maddeningly coy as to what they're being true about.

Clinton while sitting in an airplane appears to be looking at a front-page story in USA Today about Pence’s controversy. The photographer is reportedly a woman named Your Name Here who was on the same Boston-to-New York flight.How did we get from "intently looking at" to "appears to be looking at"? Helly, I'm still trying to figure out how the photographer rates a "reportedly." But hang on, there's a nut graf as well:

Clinton, a Democrat, was the subject of several investigations during her White House bid about her use of private email servers to send and receive official State Department information, while running the agency.

In other words, all's right with the world. Trump is going to save us from the immigrants again, another cold case has been solved and Killary Emails GAAAAAAAAAH!